Tag Archives: Challenges

Banking

Challenges with Bank Tenders

In old days, tendering was the most challenging job. It used to consume a lot of time in document filing, complicated offer price calculation, attending pre and post meeting and many other related tasks.

A normal day of tenderer started with flipping the pages of newspaper for bank tenders, which mostly he cut and save in a file. Be it Indian bank tenders, Indian overseas tenders or any other, every tender starts with this daily routine. After selecting the tender, the tender head to the concerned department to buy the required tender documents. Fill out the forms, attach the documents and certificates and deposit it to the department with a demand draft on time. This is the traditional way of applying for any tender.

But, scenario has changed. The new breed of tenderers is a bit lucky. As a result of technology advancement, new-generation tenderers wake up in the morning and just access their mail inbox to explore the bank tenders waiting for them. They just download the most suitable tender and start working. For instance, if they select Indian bank tenders, they will visit the website of the concerned department, download the document, pay the money online and send the documents via mail. Very simple and quick, isn’t it?

If you’re a novice, there are many websites that provide complete tender management solutions. Whether you want to know more about domestic or Indian overseas bank tenders, you can even attend the tender opening on your own through such sites. The process has become easier nowadays and it now more difficult to access and apply for any tender.  To win any bank tenders, make it sure, you spend some time to understand its requirement first rather than just apply blindly. It is very important because unless you understand their need completely, you can approach and convince them to assign it to you.

Every bank has its own set of requirements and hence, it is advised to read the bank tenders and its requirements thoroughly. Indian Bank tenders used to contain many sections to provide information accurately. Check your resources and make it sure that it exactly matches with the bank requirement.Online bidding has made the process easy and get everything done in seconds.
 

To get detail of bank tenders like Indian bank tenders, Indian overseas bank tenders and other tenders visit free tenders site.

Finance

The Challenges For Islamic Finance in Hong Kong

In my previous article, “How Does Shariah Compliance Work?” I touched upon the challenges that Hong Kong’s government faces when trying to implement the required changes to establish a level playing field between traditional financial products and the alternatives presented by Islamic finance. Looking at the experience in the UK provides a useful example of the absolute potential and growth this financial services niche offers.

The UK government made the establishment of a suitable fiscal and regulatory framework for Islamic finance in the UK a key focus in 2003. Since then the UK government has achieved the following:

o In 2003 it removed the double tax on Islamic mortgages and extended the tax relief on Islamic mortgages to companies as well as individuals.
o As a financial centre, London became more attractive to issue and trade sukuks, ie Islamic bonds, by reforming the arrangements for issuance of bonds so that returns and income payments could be treated as if they were interest.
o The UK’s financial services regulatory body, the Financial Services Authority, introduced initiatives that ensured that the regulatory treatment of Islamic finance is consistent with its overall statutory objectives and principles.

The UK government even considered issuing Shariah-compliant bonds as well as offering Shariah-compliant retail banking products via National Savings & Investments and conducted a corresponding review. Although it announced in November 2008 that neither presently offers value for money, the government confirmed that it would monitor the situation closely. At the same time, the UK government decided to support the development of Islamic finance whilst ensuring that conventional and alternative finance are treated equally. The focus is thus on identifying existing market barriers and using legislation to ensure that Shariah-compliant products can be offered and can compete on an equal footing with more conventional forms of finance. Particular efforts have been made to ensure that existing tax and regulatory systems in the UK do not distort the market for investors wishing to invest in those types of products.

The upshot of this pro-active and forward looking approach by the UK government can be seen by the results achieved so far. To-date, Islamic product offerings in the UK include:

o Five fully Shariah-compliant banks. An additional 17 provide Shariah-compliant services through “Islamic windows” whereby they can offer expertise in Islamic finance to businesses and members of the public. This is more than any other non-Muslim country.
o The London Stock Exchange has listed a total of 18 sukuk issues, which raised US$ 10bn. This is exceeded only by Dubai Nasdaq.
o Of the total seven Shariah compliant exchange traded funds, four were launched in 2008 alone. Also, 2008 saw an additional two new equity funds launched.
o In terms of non-banking products, the first company to offer Shariah-compliant insurance, known as takaful, to UK residents was authorised in 2008.
o Supporting this development of Islamic finance are 18 law firms that provide Islamic finance support. In addition, the Big Four professional service firms provide Islamic finance advisory services.
o To provide educational support in excess of 50 institutions offer the necessary Islamic finance educational and training products. This is significantly more than any other country worldwide.

This is a tough act to follow for the Hong Kong government. Not only will it have to compete with the solid legal and regulatory platform that the UK government has provided, but the UK has a six year head start. The UK has done an excellent job in securing its position as the key western centre for Islamic finance. Given the potential for, in particular, East Asia, I would hope that the Hong Kong government is suitably motivated to make the necessary changes in the Hong Kong legal and regulatory framework as well.

Let me therefore repeat my call to the Financial Secretary, John Tsang. Please, Mr Tsang, be bold, and take the plunge. Enact the required legislation as soon as possible. You will not only raise the profile of Hong Kong as a global financial centre but you will also create a significant number of new jobs, jobs that the financial services industry in Hong Kong badly needs. Just in case you require advice on any additional changes required, there are a number of locally resident experts who can point you in the right direction. In addition, my email address is also shown at the bottom of this article, and I would only be too happy to sit down and discuss this in more detail with you. The financial services industry, as well as its supporting professional services, like accounting and law, will thank you for it!

Ruediger Prenzlin is the CFO of HK Islamic Index Limited, Hong Kong’s first equity index to feature an Islamic compliant portfolio of companies. He can be contacted on cfo@hkislamicindex.com. For further information, please visit http://www.arabcci.org and click on the link to the HK Islamic Index.

Banking

Overcoming the Challenges Faced While Testing a Banking Application

In my previous article “Is Testing Banking Application a Nightmare – Know Why?” I described the challenges testers face while testing a banking application which makes it his nightmare. This article would be dedicated in finding out various strategic approaches to overcome those challenges mentioned earlier.

Approaches to Overcome the Challenges:

1. Monitor regression testing throughout the application lifecycle: Regression testing is crucial to monitor throughout the app lifecycle so that the test suite is administered and sustained across releases, set under version control, and linked to requirements. Test cases that would be used in test environment should be precise enough to set the expectation regarding test data. The following approaches can used to achieve cost effectiveness:
• Risk based testing
• Test Automation
• Off-shoring or outsourcing to third party testing vendors
 
Ideally, the organization should always think about risk based testing before automating test cases outsourcing the test activities. The goal should be to reduce the number of tests to be executed for every release cycle thus keeping the risk in threshold range.
 
Defect rate per executed test during regression testing is always high in case of new functionality. Apart from this, majority of defects found by regression testing are due to integration issues which is the result of changes made in one component that is being used in another component. Hence, regression test needs to cover higher level integration test.
 
Test automation is an effective way of reducing cost of regression testing. The main reason behind this is that the automated test suites can be run multiple times during every release cycle without too much maintenance effort. 
 
Off-shoring testing activities to countries with lower labor costs is another way that should be combined with risk based approach and test automation. 
 
2. Ensure test data usage meets regulatory compliances requirements and guidelines: In order to maintain data confidentiality, we can use following two ways: 
 
• Data Masking: This method can be used to alter the data testers copy from production server in a way that it no more contains any sensitive information and can be used for testing purposes directly. The main benefit of this approach is that it gives a good coverage regarding diversity and volume of data and the option to reproduce production scenarios. However, for regression testing, data masking is not considered as a very effective option as the underlying production data can change over time and lead to different results. Hence, this method always incurs an overhead of verifying the test data.
 
• Synthetic test data: Synthetic test data is considered as an excellent approach to generate test data under the aspects of compliance, sustainability and integrity. However, there is always some gap regarding coverage as it not feasible to synthetically produce all kinds of data with all the systems. In scenarios where integrity across the systems is not necessary, synthetic data coverage can be much better.
 
3. Testing system integration and integrity of test data: To make sure that testing covers the integration of different systems and integrity of test data, one needs to test it in the test environment which is similar to production environment. Setting up such a test environment is a real challenge. Using pre-production environment with production data is the most feasible alternative one can think of. But this method involves high risk of losing on confidentiality of data as lot of resources will be using the production data while performing such test. Hence, to fulfill the demand, a dedicated system integration test environment needs to have:
 
• System Coverage 
• Operational Coverage 
• Data Coverage & Integrity
• Environment Management
 
Implementing these steps would definitely help overcome the challenges faced while testing a banking application. However, it is important to understand that sometimes the outcome of one challenge may result in complications of other challenges. Further, the more complicated system landscape is, regression testing becomes more important.

AppLabs, a CSC company is the world’s largest Software Testing Quality Management Company. Our Quality Management and Testing Services utilize its many years of banking and finance experience across the globe to support clients who view technology as a business enabler and see the importance of getting implementation right first time.